Going Viral on Pinterest: Driving Big Traffic and Making Pinterest a Real Marketing&nbspSolution

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

When I was first introduced to Digg in 2007 I didn’t leave the computer until I absorbed every piece of information that Kevin Rose made available to me. When I switched over to Reddit in 2008, I found the content even more enthralling and gave out upvotes until my fingers bled on nearly ever subreddit. A little over two months ago my girlfriend, Alaina was on her laptop on the couch totally enchanted by some type of site I had never seen before. However, I knew the passion and attention she was giving the site was all too familiar. There she was pinning and repinning content onto her boards like it was her job. As a marketer of nearly seven years, I absolutely knew this “Pinterest” thing was going to be huge. I never would have expected, however, that it would change the world of viral marketing so quickly.

It was during that month of January that Pinterest exploded from a casual social network to an absolute powerhouse of over 10 million users. By this point, it was driving more referral traffic than Google+, Youtube, and LinkedIn. For a social network remaining under the radar for the marketing industry, these are numbers that can’t be ignored.

The Power behind Pinterest

The best way to understand the power behind Pinterest is to compare it to the last ruler of viral traffic: The Front Page of Digg. We all remember the stunning days of 2007-2008 when reaching the front page of Digg was considered a milestone in your career. When developing content specifically for Digg was fun and actually reaching the front page was cause for celebration . . . and panic as your servers soon overloaded with traffic and eventually crashed. Those were fun times, indeed, and I have missed them ever since Digg’s mishap that resulted in a mass migration to other social networks.

I still remember my first Digg front page in 2008; I even printed it out and thought about framing it at that point in my career. Below is the actual data from my first three “Front Pagers” and what I thought would be the best traffic that I could ever drive to a website in a 24 hour time-frame.

In 2008 on a good day the front page of Digg could drive around 30-50 thousand visitors in a 24 hour time span. After the content was off the front page, it often disappeared into oblivion to never be seen again. That was the life of viral marketing back then and a lot of people have said since Digg’s demise that it would never be possible to reach those levels again.

However, I’m here to tell you that in the past two months I have not only reached those levels again, I have completely obliterated the old “Digg Effect”.

Below are the analytics from a single piece of content created for my personal site nearly over two weeks ago geared specifically towards Pinterest. As you can see, there’s a HUGE difference between the two.

Not only did this one piece of content nearly triple the traffic that was produced by the old Digg, but the average time spent on site is nearly 2 minutes and 43 seconds. This is exponentially better than the 12-13 seconds regular content is awarded from going viral on other social networks. The best part about going viral on Pinterest, however, is that once it hits its peak the traffic simply doesn’t stop. With the site’s growth in unique users and ability to “repin” and share, viral content will continue to bring in thousands of daily visitors for up to 3-4 weeks.

So how did I go about getting 46 thousand repins from one piece of content on my personal site? It’s all about the content, baby.

Understanding the Pinterest Community

When I started researching how to better understand the Pinterest community and its users I was met with some criticism. Being told “I’m revoking your man-card” or “you’re wasting your time” were the most frequent. However, as I soon began seeing results my peers began to ask me if I was casting some type of voodoo magic over the Pinterest users. I have played D&D before and I do have a set of dice, however, I am no magic user when it comes to Pinterest.It's not about knowing what women want, it's about knowing what the community wants.

The real secret to understanding the Pinterest community is this: IT’S JUST LIKE EVERY OTHER SOCIAL NETWORK. Just like Digg, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter . . . pictures of cute animals and memes run rampant. While there are some exceptions to this rule, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see something from Reddit hit the popular page of Pinterest. Yes it’s true that throwing up a picture of Ryan Reynolds shirtless or of Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl-ing” a kitten will probably get you thousands of repins, it will never result in any traffic through to your site. The most important thing to remember is that the users of Pinterest are looking to share and repin creative ideas and advice.

There are thousands of infographics being submitted to Pinterest on a daily basis. However, I can count on my hand how many infographics I’ve ever seen make it to the popular page of Pinterest. When it comes to going viral, making the popular page is an absolute necessity in the effectiveness of your content. While infographics might work on every other social network, they just aren’t what the Pinterest users are looking to share. The whole point of infographics is to visually interpret data in a way that’s appealing to the users. While information and knowledge is extremely convenient, it just doesn’t fit in well with the ideals of Pinterest. Every few years there is a change in the trends associated with the design of content for social sites. While infographics have been a hot item for years, they just aren't working at the level I've seen with other content on Pinterest.

That’s why the team at 97th Floor and I are proud to share with you what we believe is the first of a new type of visual content: Instructographics.

Instructographics for Pinterest:

Since the term of “instructographics” has never been used before, I guess I should provide a formal definition. Instructographics are a vertical representation of creative ideas or steps that guides the user to a specific deliverable. It doesn’t matter if it’s a recipe, hairstyle, do-it-yourself project . . . instructographics work on nearly any level. Why do these graphics work better than infographics on Pinterest? It’s simply because the instructographic walks the user through a series of instructions that will result in something useful in real life.

Pinterest is all about the sharing of ideas and the instructographic is the perfect type of content for doing such.

So how does one go about constructing an instructographic? At 97th Floor we use the following methods when setting up one of our many Pinterest marketing campaigns:

Step 1: Find an Idea

For this step it’s pretty simple, just find an idea of a cool concept or creation that you think would go over well in the Pinterest community. The possibilities are endless; however, make sure the idea is something that you’ve never seen before.

Do you have an idea that is just so brilliant that it’s never been seen before? Good, that’s what you’ll need. After you’ve determined exactly what you want to share with the community, get your team together and start brainstorming the processes you’ll need to take to get to a final product. While you could probably make a monster instructographic outlining every single detail, I believe in K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Step 2: Begin the Design

After you’ve determined exactly what content your instructographic will contain, begin designing a basic step by step vertical guide. It is important to remember to keep the title of your instructographic as visible as possible as it will be the first thing viewed by the users of Pinterest.

Step 3: Upload to your Client Site

Unlike other social networks that give major notice to the URL that the image is uploaded on, Pinterest gives very little attention to this element. As long as the content is remotely similar to the site and looks like it fits it will be just find with Pinterest.

Step 4: Size it Correctly

What’s the difference between 40 visitors to your site from an instructographic and 40,000? The size of your content. As long as your content is longer than 2,500 pixels it will be unreadable by the Pinterest users. Anything smaller and Pinterest will magnify the image so that it's readable on the site (meaning there's no reason to click through to your page). This forces them to click on your submission, through to your page to view the content. If it’s something that’s worth reading and creative, this is a necessity. If it’s longer than 5,000 pixels, then create a simple 300x300 pixel button outlining your graphic. The reason for this is because the “like” and “repin” buttons are at the top of the submission. If they have to scroll too far town to view the entire piece, chances are they aren’t going to scroll up to click on those buttons. For me the ideal image is 600x3000 pixels.

Step 5: Submit and Pin!

When your instructographic is ready to be shared, there are several important elements that you should keep in mind before submitting to Pinterest.

If you're still having troubles understanding the intricacies of the instructographic below is one 97th Floor recently designed for a client which received 14,000+ repins:

The Pinterest Popularity Algorithm

Like every other social network in the realm of the internets, there is a science behind going popular on Pinterest. This is no way considered gaming the Pinterest site, however, it will give your content the best chance possible to make it to the popular board.

Once every piece of content is submitted it is placed onto the top of the specific category pages. Getting to the top of these pages is essential to going viral on Pinterest. Consider these category pages your springboard to the popular page. You do not need an established or aged account to get to the top, however, there are some elements that will block your attempts. Every piece of content is placed onto the top of the category pages barring it doesn’t break any of the following guidelines:

You’ve submitted within the past hour

It seems that in an effort to combat spam, Pinterest has limited every user account to ONE piece of content on the category pages per hour. We tell all our clients to hold off on the pinning up to three hours before we’re ready for a content push.

You’ve hosted your content on Imgur

I have no idea why Pinterest has done so, but any piece of content hosted on Imgur will not make it to the top of the category pages. I’m guessing this is a maneuver to differentiate themselves from Reddit, however, no one has explained the reasoning quite yet. Just beware if you plan on rehosting content on your site.

Timing the Submission

As with every social network, there is a specific time that you can submit that will give you the best chance of reaching the front or popular pages. Pinterest is no different as their users tend to be more active during different points of the day. The goal as a content creator is to get your content onto the site when it is least competitive yet most effective. With Pinterest this time tends to be between 5-7AM and 5-7PM EST. The reason for this is because the majority of users are either waking up or getting off work to check their Pinterest boards. Since this is the case, you want to submit your content at least one hour beforehand to ensure that it will be visible to the most people at the right time.

Monitoring Your Content

After your content has been submitted to Pinterest and gone viral, it is important that you check the popular boards routinely to see if your content has been rehosted on any different sites or blogs. As the creators of the content you are entitled to every visitor that it receives. Unfortunately sites such as 9Gag have included the “Pin It” button allowing the users to direct 100% of the traffic to their site. I have found that if you ask the user that pinned your content from a site like this to nicely to change the URL, they will abide. While it might seem tedious and time consuming, this is essentially thousands of visitors that your client will be missing out on if you do not follow through.

Conclusion

Pinterest is here to stay and if it’s not in your marketing plans yet, it very well should be. I expect Pinterest to double in size and traffic potential in the coming months. It’s important to remember that while the majority of Pinterest users are women, more men are starting to migrate over due to its easy usability and creative content. Don’t be one of those companies kicking themselves in a few months because you didn’t get in on the trend. They said Facebook would never take over Myspace and Twitter would be useless to social marketing. Experts are saying the same thing about Pinterest right now. I’m here to tell you they’re wrong.

About Colby_Almond —
I'm Colby Almond and I'm a marketer with 97th Floor and I've been in the game for nearly 7 years. I live, breath, and sweat social media and creative content. I'm also the most devoted UNC fan you'll ever meet.

The Note: the fact that you discovered Pinterest thanks to your girlfriend is a clear sign (if another was needed) that women are almost the only users of this new social tool (being men a very small %).

The question: I imagine that the users of Pinterest are mainly from the USA, but it is correct to say that it is having a big impact also on this side of the Atlantic ocean. In your Analytics did you have notice also this increasing interest from the European countries (I know, 1 site cannot be taken as a statistical model, but may give hints).

Finally, my consideration about the success of Pinterest:

1) its visual nature makes it a global marketing tool without all the problems related to language and localization;

2) the strict relation with Facebook makes its diffusion quite a natural thing. The fact I have my own Facebook friends following me also on Pinterest simply because the system says them I'm in is a win win tactic.

Good observations about Pinterest being a global marketing tool... I hadn't thought about the fact that it isn't tied to the problems with language and localization.

I think that while Pinterest has a specific demographic range right now, it will expand as Colby has mentioned. After all, wasn't Facebook just a college site for quite some time? Now my grandma uses it.

After reading a few articles about the importance of Pinterest over the past week, this one convinced me to create my account. Thanks for the simple but detailed guide. And if it isn't already, you should Trademark the phrase "Instructographic" :).

It's interesting you posted this today. I've been twisting and turning my head about what to like about Pinterest. I visited the site and was totally turned off by it from a regular male's perspective but totally fascinated by it from a marketer's standpoint. I wrote a post over at EntrepreneurRookie about it this morning and in my research, I found the one thing everyone first notices, It's overwhelmingly female, a good 80 - 90% female drive 85% of the site activity, and what mainly keep them addicted are images related to crafts (Etsy users are all over it), fashion, food, and health and beauty stuff.

In fact a study by the BlogHer website shows women trust Pinterest more than Twitter and Facebook in that order. 81% Pinterest, 73% Twitter, and 67% Facebook. That's such a quick turnaround. If you want to get noticed on Pinterest target those women. If your site or client's site is relevant to them, create an appealing "instructographic" as Colby dubbed it, or an image related to any of the categories above and hopefully you should be showered with traffic.

Nice post, I remember getting on page one of DIGG a few times the traffic was really good one of the top times I saw around ~ 55,000+ visitors in a one day period.

The thing is but with Pinterest and Digg you have very different user bases, the type of content that goes crazy on Digg was tech content and any sub section to that. In my experience testing viral methods on Pinterest what does viral is any thing which is more suited to girls or funny styled images.

I admit I have been pushing out a fair bit of good content over at Pinterest, but I think the niche on Digg was far more easier to target imo.

Looks like its time for all of us to get more in touch with our feminine side :). But seriously, I'm one of the only guys on there and there are like 90 of my friends that are girls on there. I think the allure of it is it's a visual wonderland not full of the ugly tech stuff that's usually found on the web, it's a visual refuge for the eyes.

Now with all of this traffic, the question is what type of conversions have you seen and do visitors linger around and check out other pages?

Conversions are up if the content is in tune with the products of the site. I'm seeing about 1.46 pageviews/visit on really tuned content. Not bad at all, but be aware of your site layout before you attempt any graphic. I like to have products visible on the right and bottom of the posts. Helps guide them into clicking around.

Not only does it outline all the basics, but it gives a solid grounding in the average user's behaviour (e.g. "The whole point of infographics is to visually interpret data in a way that’s appealing to the users. While information and knowledge is extremely convenient, it just doesn’t fit in well with the ideals of Pinterest.")

Most posts I just tend to gloss over and gain a little more understanding on a topic - but this particular one I can take away actionable objectives. I'm defnitely giving the instructographics a go - it's ideal in my niches (cooking, cookware, homewares etc).

This is one of the most useful posts I've read in months, and I like your focus on driving traffic rather than simply trying to create linkbait (not that that is without value). But this is a model exercise in the application of the 'inbound marketing' ethos that Rand was discussing recently. Kudos, Colby, I don't think we've heard the last of instructographics.

That's totally buzz like post for me!! Well I have been using pinterest since last 4 months and I have seen good repins over there but as you said , "Many companies think that it's not useful that much for generating the traffic to the main target site!"---Now this sentence seems irrelevant and untrue because you shown a real good example of Instructographics , which can definitely get lots of people to the main site!! Intially i was thinking that Pinterest is just about having Good HD pics and infographics but instructographics (it's new and interesting for me) has much better potential to make the user click and visit the main website!!

It doesn't matter for me , whether females percentage is higher or male's percentage over the Pinterest because same statement was being applied for FB in it's initial days but now the scenario is changed , Now everyone is over FB , hence I strongly believe that Pinterest also will have every kind of folks!!! Thanks!!! Awesome Post Colbs, A big thumb up to you for your thorough research about Pinterest!!

Have been using Pinterest for few months now and I still think that since this social medium is overwhelmingly female, many male oriented industries/markets are better off focusing on Facebook, YouTube, etc. Has anyone seen the most recent demographic data on Pinterest users that could convince me otherwise?

Nice post, but with the Pinterest traffic showing a 93.48% Bounce Rate, is it really worth it? If the aim is to just drive traffic, it makes sense, and obviously the amounts of traffic are huge - but for clients who are usually looking at traffic turning into conversions, it sounds difficult to justify.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing the traffic the most I've been able to do is around 1,000. Though I never have control over the content. I think the use of the graphic is great and using a meme probably doubled it. Now just to think of a way to make it correlate to my topics and see if I can get the content creators to oblige. I do hate it when I don't have control of content, but at least they listen some times.

Colby, thanks so very much for such an intersting and useful post. But I am bit skeptical about few things. After reading this article, there is no doubt that pinterest can get you huge no. of visiotors. However, if I were to look at the bounce rate and exit rate which is 93% seems way high. It gives me an impression that, pinterest won't get you customers.

Please shed some light on this, it'll really help me to draft a solid strategy for marketing my websites (products/services)

@seoraj & also @Time Solutions above. I think Colby is showing the potential reach of the piece/tactic. If you re-read his post, he mentions that of the non-bouncers, time on site was 2 minutes 43 seconds instead of 13-14 seconds that he had excperienced with Digg (likely the time it takes for page to load and contento to be digested if an infographic/meme + a giggle).

Just think about that for a minute.

If you have a shopping Mall full of people, and you have 2 minutes and 43 seconds to present your product to 1500 people, do you not think that would be worth the risk of gaining some new customers (maybe not on the first time but on return visits through remarketing, or branding your site, for example) by taking the time that Colby has done in doing this. As I say, remarketing is an easy way to get people in the bucket (ask Joanna Lord) and if your site's design is something to be desired, then your brand may be recognised next time around (not necessarily from Remarketing).

Great post, Colby. Just a shame Pinterest went nofollow so quickly, but to be expected?!

Bounce rate is a flawed metric. If the goal is to have someone absorb and article and leave, then the goal is met with a high bounce rate.

'I came, I puked, I left,' is only a problem for some sites and not all. Bearing in mind this was a test of inbound traffic on a new social medium, I'm not sure if we're meant to be measuring site interaction.

Any programs you know of that can schedule pins? I need something like hootsuite but for Pinterest. I'm not one to get up at 5 in the morning or do work after work. And making the client post it seems a little unfair. Any help would be great.

Traffic seems like a bit of a buzz word for Pinterest at the moment, as if the owners were doing all of their own PR. I don't think you can take the traffic stats at face value, I wrote a blog on the subject: http://bit.ly/Hwc8xQ

Any programs you know of that can schedule pins? I need something like hootsuite but for Pinterest. I'm not one to get up at 5 in the morning or do work after work. Any making the client post it seems a little unfair. Any help would be great.

Thanks for the great post and great info, however what are your thoughts on the effect of the rising popularity of Pinterest on individual content posts.

I ask this as I feel that the concept of paid ads or posts is not far away. Also with more and more people submitting content the time period for which the post will be present on the home page will reduce significantly.

Paid ads and posts are on the way and I believe that's what they're gearing up for in terms of monetizing the site. However, I have always said this and I'll say it again, CONTENT IS KING. If you work hard, come up with a creative concept and submit it to the site, it will go viral. With Pinterest there is no gaming of the system. They appreciate good, honest, and creative content. If you follow the rules I've outlined, your content will stand out significantly more than any other Pin.

Today's society is filled with visual learners. They love pictures, videos and anything that's "pretty" to the eye and I think that's why Pintrest has become so popular. There are so many creative ideas out there when it comes to style, fashion, home decor, cooking, ect and people are just dying to share their ideas with others. I don't think I've been to a party or get together in over a year that someone hasn't mentioned the dish they made coming from "something they saw on Pintrest". I feel like Pintrest is different in that they encourage creativity and self promotion. If a business is able to create something visually engaging and interesting to the eye, it will get some buzz on Pintrest.

It makes it really sound really easy . But not every person can use instructographics. People with photoblogs can not i think. And just one pin leads to 40 k :O nice :D I have been trying to experiment pinning things. I do not understand the logic what makes user pin one item and not the other one though they might be the same -.- :(

Hey Colby.. great article, thanks for sharing your insight into Pinterest. I look forward to trying some of these tactics and watching their effects.... also looking forward to building a lego wall in the playroom ;)

While Pinterest is no doubt a great idea and generates good traffic if you really pin great stuff, I think that there is a lot of room to improve. One flaw that has been discovered is Pinterest’s search functionality (http://www.artdriver.com/pinterest-flaw). Search results generate lots of content duplication and do not credit the original source properly.

Guys not to scare anyone from Pinterest, but I dug a little deeper today and found everything disturbing about their business model and legal terms of agreement. Like most users, I didn't read through the entire agreement until this afternoon. Seems they have some serious copyright infringement issues. A lawyer/photographer and Ex-Pinterest user posted this article on businessinsider.com last month warning users. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-28/tech/31106641_1_repinning-copyright-entire-image

Its an addictive service for most women but here goes that nasty Copyright issue that evil SOPA Act was trying to kill us all with a couple months ago.

Thanks for this awesome post Colby. My girlfirned too has been trying to convert me to a Pinterest beliver, but I had been skeptical about the sucess of this medium for non-picture based websites. But your post has toally convinced me about the amazing potential of Pinterest for all type of businesses.

'Instructographic' is a great one:) BTW any idea if we might get the Step 2, anytime soon?

I've used pinterest to optimize my site and the result was amazing my site was jumped from #234 to #9 in few weeks time. The trick is we must got our website pinned and repinned by many people this is the hardest part. Most of pinterest users won't doing repin when they aren't like what we pinned. I do simple thing to outsource it on fiverr and got my site pinned by more than 70 people, I don't know how can he did it just search by typing pinterest on fiverr and you will find it. As I know currently pinterest is best for SEO for these reason:1. Once our website pinned it has 3 backlinks counts2. Google interest in social media signal so it will not tagged as links farm3. Currently pinterest links are dofollow even the image4. Also support anchor text, it's perfect for placing our keywords

Another thing I would add is that Pinterest users often go back to the boards that created the original pin...so brands can create similar-situation boards that feature one full lifestyle, including their products and non-competing, complementary products that the consumer might already own.

Once every piece of content is submitted it is placed onto the top of the specific category pages. Getting to the top of these pages is essential to going viral on Pinterest.

It seems that I can only pin to my own boards and can't choose to pin to the DIY category itself....? Are you just supposed to have a board that is categorized in each one and pin it to all of your own boards? Does it work that way?

Another question. On whos Pinterest profile did you share your client's Instructographic? Or did you create a brand profile? I don't know whether to create a pin board on my profile which relates to my client's industry or do we take this thing to a higher brand power?

'For consumers, the likelihood that someone will challenge your right to content is probably low. For a business, the risks are much higher for two reasons: 1) commercial use (in other words, for business) is offered less protection; and (2) companies have deeper pockets.'

Great post Colby - I have been considering using pinterest for some time, particularly with its high exposure of late. I have found your step by step guide very useful especially the part about sizing it correctly. Incorrect sizing would be a mistake that is easy to make and I think this could have happened to me if it wasn't for your article but thanks to you I am now wiser to this. Thanks!!